JavaOne 2009 Recap

JavaOne 2009 is winding down.  This year the conference had a more somber feel.  It was really hard to pick up any energy about a new trend or technology.  The main question on people’s mind was ‘What is Oracle going to do?’.

Of course no one has any idea what Oracle is going to do.  Larry Ellison did make a cameo appearance during the keynote and provided some insight.  His main message was ‘Oracle is heavily invested in Java and will invest even more, so don’t worry.’  He also expressed support for JavaFX and suggested openoffice should be re-written in it.   I’m not a big fan of JavaFX, so I was hoping Oracle would stop JavaFX; seems I will be wrong.

The rest of the Sun keynote was basically a trip down memory lane for Java.  There were a couple of JavaFX demos, including a new tool for building JavaFX applications.  The best thing I can say about the new tool is that the demo didn’t crash.   For the life of me, I can’t understand why Sun would invest in yet another developer tool.

One observation about the keynote is that I can’t remember any reference to open source.  No mention of OpenJDK or any of the Sun projects.  Found this rather odd since Sun is suppose to be the open source company?

The exhibit hall was a lot smaller than previous years.   Most of the major vendors Oracle, HP, IBM, Nokia, SAP, Motorola were not exhibiting.  JBoss, Atlassian, SpringSource were the major Java enterprise vendors exhibiting.

I did discover some interesting Eclipse oriented products:

- eBay was showing a very cool Javascript/Java development environment called VJET.   It is not available yet but they plan to make it available and you can sign up for an early access program.

- JNBridge helps solve the interoperability challenges between a Java and .Net application.   They have an Eclipse plugin.

- Anthillpro is a build management tool that can be driven from Eclipse.  They also had their booth next to us on the show floor.

- JavaRebel seems like a pretty interesting tool to shorten the debug cycle.  They have support for Equinox and Jetty plus other containers.

- Hello2morrow has some neat dependency analysis and visualization tools.  They don’t have OSGi bundle support but it is planned.

- Altassian was showing they new Eclipse Mylyn integration.

JavaOne 2010 is set for end of June next year.  It will be the first one with Oracle in charge, so it should be an fascinating event.

From http://ianskerrett.wordpress.com